The best essay on the subject was written by Gershom Scholem in 1966
It is now almost two decades since the great scholar Gershom Scholem pronounced his verdict on the Jewish-German "symbiosis": "The love affair of the Jews and the Germans remained one-sided and unreciprocated." The enthusiasm for German culture that had stamped his and earlier generations of extraordinary German-speaking intellectuals and artists was misguided. The Jews, he said, had unfortunately been dwelling at the wrong address, and that address had always been on a one-way street. Even the much envied "preeminence" achieved by the Central European Jewish cultural renaissance of the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries was never truly appreciated by their German contemporaries. The very success of those Jews stoked the fires of ressentiment and anti-Semitism. They became a "source of irritation" and their "preeminence turned into disaster for them."
THE Jewish passion for all things German
http://www.scribd.com/doc/18012543/GERSHOM-SCHOLEM-JEWS-AND-GERMANS-
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/jews-and-germans-4266?search=1
Jews and Germans by Gershom Scholem
Commentary Magazine November 1966
I do not count myself among them, for I do not believe that there ought to be such a thing as a permanent state of war among peoples. I also deem it right-what is more, I deem it importantthat Jews, precisely as Jews, speak to Germans in full consciousness of what has happened and of what separates them. The atmosphere between Jews and Germans can be cleansed only if we seek to get to the bottom of their relationship, and only if we employ the unrestrained criticism that the case demands.
The furtive glances cast by the Jews toward the Germans were from the very outset attended by considerable dislocations, which at a later stage of the process were to lead to bitter problems. As the price of Jewish emancipation, the Germans demanded a disavowal of Jewish nationality-a price the leading writers and spokesmen of the Jewish avant-garde were only too happy to pay. For what had begun as furtive glances soon turned into a passionate involvement with the realm of German history; and the objects of enlightened toleration not infrequently became ardent prophets, prepared to speak in the name of the Germans themselves. The attentive reader of German reactions to this process and its acrobatics soon perceives a recurrent note of astonishment, and an irony that is partly amiable, partly malicious. With the renunciation of a crucial part of Jewish existence in Germany, the ground was prepared for what appears to many of us to have been a completely false start in the history of modern relations between Jews and Germans-even though, given the conditions of 1800, it possessed a certain immanent logic of its own. The liberals hoped for a decisively progressive Jewish self-dissolution. The conservatives, however, with their greater sense of history, had reservations about this new phenomenon. They began to chalk up against the Jews an alltoo- great facility for renouncing their ethnic consciousness. Thus a sinister and dangerous dialectic arose. The self-surrender of the Jews, although welcomed and indeed demanded, was also often seen as evidence of their lack of moral substance and thereby contributed to the disdain in which they were held by so many Germans. For what could a heritage be worth if the elite of its chosen heirs were in such a rush to disavow it?
Such, then, was the dangerous dialectic of the whole process. The Jews struggled for emancipation- and this is the tragedy that moves us so much today - not for the sake of their rights as a people, but for the sake of assimilating themselves to the peoples among whom they lived. By their readiness to give up their peoplehood, by their act of disavowal, they did not put an end to their misery; they merely opened up a new source of agony. Assimilation did not dispose of the Jewish question in Germany; rather it shifted the locus of the question and rendered it all the more acute, for as the area of contact between the two groups widened, the possibilities of friction widened as well. The "adventure" of assimilation, into which the Jews threw themselves so passionately (it is easy to see why) necessarily increased the dangers which grew out of heightened tension.
Added to this was the fact that there was something "disordered" - and in a double sense - about the Jews who were exposed to this new encounter with the Germans: they were "disordered" by the personal and social consequences of the undignified conditions under which they were forced to live; and they were "disordered" by the deep insecurity that began to hound them the moment they left the ghetto in order, as the formula had it, "to become Germans." This double disorder of the German Jews was one of the factors which retarded, disturbed, and eventually brought to a gruesome end the process - or trial - that now began in such earnest. The refusal of so many German Jews to recognize the operation of such factors and the dialectic to which they bear witness, is among the saddest discoveries made by today's reader of the discussions of those times. The emotional confusion of the German Jews between 1820 and 1920 is of considerable importance if one wishes to understand them as a group, a group characterized by that "German-Jewishness" (Deutschjudentum) many of us encountered in our own youth and which stimulated us to resistance.
THE Jewish passion for things German is connected with the specific historical hour in which it was born. At the moment in time when Jews turned from their medieval state toward the new era of enlightenment and revolution, the overwhelming majority of them - 80 per cent - lived in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Eastern Europe. Due to prevailing geographic, political, and linguistic conditions, therefore, it was German culture that most Jews first encountered on their road to the West. Moreove r- and this is decisive - the encounter occurred precisely at the moment when that culture had reached one of its most fruitful turning- points. It was the zenith of Germany's bourgeois era, an era which produced an image of things German that, up to 1940, and among very broad classes of people, was to remain unshaken, even by many most bitter experiences. Thus a newly-awakened Jewish creativity, which was to assume such impressive forms after 1780, impinged upon a great period of German creativity. One can say that it was a happy hour, and indeed, it has no parallel in the history of Jewish encounters with other European peoples. The net result was the high luster that fell on all things German. Even today, after so much blood and so many tears, we cannot say that it was only a deceptive luster. It was also more, both in fact and in potentia.
The unending Jewish demand for a home was soon transformed into the ecstatic illusion of being at home. It is well-known, and easy to understand, that the speed of this transformation, which even today amazes the observer, the haste of this breakup of the Jews, was not paralleled by an equally quick reciprocal reaction on the part of the Germans. For the Germans had not known they were dealing with such deep processes of decay in the Jewish tradition and in Jewish self-consciousness, and they recoiled from the whole procedure. While they would have approved of the eventual result of the process - which accorded at least with the prevailing liberal ideology and to a considerable extent with the prevailing conservative one - they were altogether unprepared for this tempo, which struck them as overheated and whose aggressiveness set them on the defensive. Sooner or later this defensiveness was to combine with those currents of opinion which from the very beginning had reacted to the whole process with antipathy and which, since the post-Mendelssohn generation, had never lacked for eloquent spokesmen. No one has more profoundly characterized this breaking away of the Jews from themselves than Charles Peguy, who had an insight into the Jewish condition rarely attained, let alone surpassed, by non-Jews. To him we owe the sentence: "Etre ailleurs, le grand vice de cette race, la grande vertue secrete, la grande vocation de ce peuple."* This "being elsewhere" combined with the desperate wish to "be at home" in a manner at once intense, fruitful, and destructive. It is the clue to the relationship of the Jews to the Germans. It is what makes their symbolic position so alluring and so gripping to today's observer, and it is also what at the time caused them to appear disgusting, to be working under false pretenses, and to be deliberately provocative of opposition.
No benefit redounded to the Jews of Germany from what today, under very different circumstances, invests them with positive significance for an important part of the world and brings them special consideration: I am thinking of the widespread current appreciation of Jews as classic representatives of the phenomenon of man's alienation from society. The German Jew was held to blame for Most of the ablest Jewish minds, however, enhanced German society with an astonishingly profuse outpouring in the fields of economics, science, literature, and art. In a famous essay, the great American sociologist, Thorstein Veblen, wrote of the intellectual "pre-eminence" of the Jews; it was this pre-eminence that was to spell their doom in Germany. In their economic role, the Jews had served as a progressive force in the development of 19th-century Germany, but long after there had ceased to be a need for that, they continued to exercise-especially in the 20th century- a cultural function which from the very beginning had awakened unrest and resistance, and had awakened unrest and resistance, and which never did them any good. That the Germans did in fact need the Jews in their spiritual world is now, when they are no longer present, noticed by many, and there is mourning over the loss. But when the Jews were there, they were a source of irritation (whether they wanted to be or not).
By the middle of the 19th century, the great majority of Germans had at last become reconciled to the political emancipation of the Jews, but there was no corresponding readiness to accept the unrestrained movement of the Jews into the ranks of the culturally active. The Jews, of course, with their long intellectual tradition, considered themselves made-to-order for such an active role among the German elite. But this is precisely what stimulated a resistance that was to become increasingly vigorous and virulent, and was finally to prevent the process of their acceptance from having any chance of fulfillment. By and large, then, the love affair of the Jews and the Germans remained one-sided and unreciprocated; at best it awakened something like compassion (as it did with Theodore Fontane, to name only one famous, but hardly unambiguous, example) or grat itude. But if the Jews did on occasion meet with gratitude, they almost never found the love they were seeking.
Nothing corresponds to this in the much-discussed German-Jewish dialogue-a dialogue which in fact never took place. At a time when no one cared a whit about them, no German stood forth to recognize the genius of Kafka, Simmel, Freud, or Walter Benjamin-to say nothing of recognizing them as Jews. The present, belated concern with these great figures does nothing to change this fact. The feeling was widespread that the emancipation of the Jews heralded the appearance of radical and subversive tendencies. And indeed, during a century of prominence in journalism, the Jews did play a highly visible role in the criticism of German public affairs-a role deeply grounded in their history as well as in their social position and function. In reaction to this role, the phenomenon of anti-Semitism-to which the Jews responded with peculiar blindnessbegan to send forth its malignant tendrils.
